Justice

‘Aristotle’s discussion of special justice shows that his theory of the mean is empty and pointless.’ Is this verdict fair? (2000 Q9)

• Yes, overall fair. Specifically, it illustrates that his theory of the mean suffers a dilemma between incoherence or triviality, and moreover is not at all action-guiding.
• Context: DoM introduced in II, underpins the discussion of all the ethical virtues. Aristotle says that virtue is a state which decides, consisting of a mean defined relative to reason. Justice gets a book of its own in NE (V), and the most detailed treatment.
• Aristotle’s theory of the mean (Young)
  • Location thesis: the virtuous state with respect to a particular quality of character is in between two states of vice, one of excess and one of deficiency
  • Intermediacy thesis: the mean is a disposition which generates particular situation-specific responses (in terms of actions and feelings) which are intermediate between those of a vicious agent.
• Taxonomy of justice: justice has two components: general justice is the part of virtue concerned with relations with other people, special justice is that part about fairness.
  • Divides further into distributive justice (how goods should be allocated) and corrective justice (how injustices should be rectified).
• First problem: seems like there aren’t two vices either side of the virtue of justice.
  • Not between doing and suffering injustice, because suffering injustice isn’t a vice: never done voluntarily.
  • Not between too much and too little: decent agent takes less than their share.
• One way to rescue: maybe it’s about intermediate conditions
  • But this is incredibly trivial, just saying that injustice is about extremes.
  • And moreover, that seems like it doesn’t properly work either: even if it is a mean about actions, it’s not really a mean about feelings.
    • Justice’s mean is about external distributions, not how the agent responds to situations. It is fundamentally about other people.
• Another problem is that the vices of injustice aren’t well-distinguished from other vices. So this is a challenge to the coherence of the doctrine of the mean: not clear that each character trait has its own axis and corresponding virtue/mean.
  • He thinks viciousness is when you act with the purpose of promoting the bad. But very few people who we’d call unjust specifically want to promote injustice, they are just insufficiently motivated by justice. (Williams)
  • So where’s the axis that justice’s mean sits on?
• Finally, decency complicates matters further, appears like there are multiple means and some are better than others.
  • This part is perhaps more avoidable, if Aristotle abandons the equivalence between lawfulness and general justice, then he could make decency alone be the virtue of justice, rather than law-abidingness.
• Even setting aside these theoretical issues with DoM, justice demonstrates that it’s not a useful guide to action.
  • As Hursthouse notes, none of the advice that Aristotle gives in III.6 onwards about attaining virtue relies on DoM.
  • With justice, Aristotle needs to invoke ideas about arithmetic and geometric averages / proportionality & desert to explain how goods ought to be allocated.
  • Simply knowing that there’s a mean is pointless in terms of being able to bring about justice.
• Conclusion: Aristotle himself seems to be aware that justice doesn’t fit into his taxonomy he says several times it’s “not like the other virtues”. It is he who seems to be overreaching in trying to fit it into the framework. The problem is not just with justice (e.g., magnanimity similarly raises problems), but it exposes most clearly the problems with the doctrine.

How philosophically useful is Aristotle’s distinction between natural and legal justice? (2017 Q7)

• Very useful.
• Book V: he talks about how natural justice has force everywhere, whereas legal justice varies from place to place.
• The idea is that there’s an objective, common component to what is just. He equates this with lawfulness, and he distinguishes what is lawful from what is legal.
  • Rejects the conventionalist view, that X is just only because the actual laws say it is so.
• It’s a useful distinction because it lets us show that actual laws aren’t the right-making property, and moreover that there’s some objective standard of rightness
• Important for his account
  • He thinks the phronimos is the standard and reference of rightness
  • So we might wonder if virtues vary between cultures / societies, with the laws. But that wouldn’t cohere with the function argument.
  • Also relates to moral education / lawgiver as teacher?
• Overall it seems quite compelling an account
  • Examples about lawful illegality, unjust laws
  • And motivates/enables the distinctions we have above
  • (but some might push the conventionalist account instead?)

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• Make it very clear that you’re not conflating it with the general/specific justice distinction.
  • At V.7, Aristotle divides “political justice” into the natural vs legal kinds; these are about the grounds of justice.
  • A chapter earlier, at V.6, he explains that political justice is the primary domain of justice: between “men who are free and either proportionately or arithmetically equal”.
    • He thinks that other kinds of justice, e.g. master-slave, husband-wife, father-son get justice only by analogy with this.
  • So this isn’t about the scope of justice (like general/specific), it’s about its domain.
• Aristotle is responding to the sophistic/conventionalist position that justice is entirely a matter of human agreement.
  • His main argument is that even if what communities call just varies, that doesn’t mean there’s no natural justice.
    • Analogy: people can be ambidextrous but the right hand is naturally stronger.
  • His distinction is interesting because it’s between the conventionalist view and the natural law view (that justice is entirely fixed by nature).
    • This helps anticipate the challenge of explaining why we have cross-cultural variation, without conceding pure relativism.
    • As noted, this matters for his function argument. He claims that “there is but one [constitution] which is everywhere by nature the best”; presumably this is linked to what promotes human flourishing, which is fixed by our nature.
• A more precise way to make link to the lawful/legal divide: natural justice provides the objective normative standard that lawfulness tracks, legality can diverge from that.
  • So an unjust law is legal but not lawful, and this fact is explained by natural justice.
  • Moreover, even when legality is approximately correct, the decent person adjusts legal rules to fit particular circumstances, which is based on the standard of natural justice.
• Two objections
  • Aristotle excludes slaves, women, and children from political justice entirely. So his view is clearly shaped by his own social assumptions.
    • The distinction is still philosophically useful, but his conclusions are less robust.
  • Aristotle says that natural justice, unlike divine justice, can change (indeed, it and legal justice are “equally changeable”). This is puzzling.
    • Perhaps the thought is that there’s a tendency which grounds natural justice.
    • Maybe changing human circumstances lead what is in a situation naturally just to change, but the principles (proportional fairness, etc) do not – a bit like the mean “relative to us”?

Is Aristotle right to think that injustice is a specific vice of character? (2018 Q7)

• No, he is not, and this demonstrates the problems that his theory has with explaining the special moral importance of justice, as well as the impotence of DoM.
• Book V about justice; divides up into general and specific justice.
  • Former is the whole part of virtue concerned with other people’s good.
    • [although doesn’t that then tread on specific justice? I find this a bit confusing]
  • Latter is divided up into distributive and rectificatory justice
• Aristotle’s view is that every virtue has two corresponding vices.
  • He struggles to show what these would be for justice. Not vices of doing and suffering injustice, because the latter is not voluntary. Not vices of taking too much and taking too little, because the latter is what the decent person does.
  • But even worse than this, it seems to be a mischaracterisation of injustice that it would be a specific vice of character.
• Williams: when we think of an unjust person, say, the swindling merchant, their motive is not the promotion of injustice. It’s their profit, or similar.
  • But for Aristotle, this person would not be unjust; they have the vice of greed. Recall that to be vicious one must be moved by a faulty conception of the good, and a desire to obtain what you’re aiming at. So to be viciously unjust, you need to desire what is unjust.
  • But that’s a much narrower scope than what we think the proper domain of (in)justice is.
  • Many people are unjust because they lack appropriate motivations for justice, not because they possess one for injustice.
• One reply [who]: the unjust person’s vice is that of overreaching (pleonexia) / a deficit of paying attention to what matters (?).
  • But looks more like a revisionist reading, doesn’t fit with Aristotle’s definition of vice (?)
• Demonstrates (a) that DoM seems to fail in the case of justice, but moreover that virtue-centric ethical theories, like Aristotle’s, seem to be parasitic on an independent account of the diaological order.
  • He doesn’t say what makes actions just or unjust, or where the right distribution comes from, except general terms about being proportional to desert – so we don’t know what is the desert-making property.

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• Remember that Aristotle’s own account of this comes in V.2 where he gives two examples of adultery – one done from appetite, one done for gain / profit.
  • Supposedly the first kind of adultery is an instance of intemperance; only the latter is an instance of injustice, because it’s motivated by pleonexia (gain).
• Also, remember Aristotle explicitly distinguishes being unjust from doing unjust acts.
  • The former is satisfied only when you act from a prohairesis motivated by gain (V.8).
  • And then Williams’s point is exactly that practically nobody chooses injustice as such, and Aristotle mischaracterises the lustful adulterer as not-unjust.
• It’s Young who gives the defence of Aristotle: we can read pleonexia as the absence of inhibition on the desire for gain (rather than positive desire for excessive gain).
  • This then moves Aristotle a lot closer to Williams’s position.
  • The cost – now we’ve conceded that the vice of injustice doesn’t have a characteristic motive. But that’s difficult for the rest of his ethics about the mean.

‘Justice is a mean, not as the other virtues are, but because it is about an intermediate condition, whereas injustice is about the extremes’. Discuss. (2016 Q4; 2019 Q5)

• This quote, taken from Book V of NE, illustrates the central difficulty in Aristotle’s account of justice: it does not fit with the taxonomy of ethical virtue he develops throughout the rest of the work (but especially in II-IV), based on the doctrine of the mean. The idea that justice is a mean because it is about an intermediate condition stretches the doctrine to absurd triviality, and undermines the notion that the doctrine is a coherent framework for understanding morality.
• What is the doctrine of the mean, intro in Book II.
  • “Virtue, then, consists in the mean relative to us, defined by reference to reason. It is a mean between two vices, one of excess and one of deficiency.”
  • Two theses (from Young): (i) location and (ii) intermediacy.
    • (i) The mean is the virtuous state in a particular dimension of character located between vices of excess and deficiency
    • (ii) The mean is a stable disposition towards a situation-specific response which leads to actions and feelings intermediate between those that would be generated by the corresponding vices.
• The problem is that (i) clearly fails.
  • Being just is not a mean between the vices of suffering and doing injustice, because the vicious person acts voluntarily yet Aristotle holds that nobody ever suffers injustice voluntarily, so it’s not a vice.
  • And neither is it a mean between vices of taking too little vs taking too much – for the decent agent “takes less than is their share” but is more admirable still than the ordinary just agent.
• Perhaps (ii) can be rescued?
  • Again, the actions do not seem to be intermediate – and given that there aren’t two vices, it’s hard to say exactly what they’re intermediate between. “Too much” and “too little” is trivial, because it smuggles in evaluative content, and given that justice is fundamentally about distribution, it’s really not very substantive to simply assert that there can be too much or too little.
  • Also, justice is more about external distribution than it is about the agent’s feelings.
• The rest of Aristotle’s discussion of justice, about arithmetic vs geometric equality, and the lawgiver, does not really rest on this notion of the mean at all.
  • Hursthouse’s view: we should just ignore the DoM, it’s conceptually unhelpful and moreover not practically useful.

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• Provide some more discussion of the context of the passage and what it’s doing.
  • It’s right after discussion of distributive and corrective justice.
  • The point is that the just distribution lies between distributor’s profit and distributor’s loss.
  • One way to defend Aristotle: justice is mean-like in its outputs (the distributions/corrections it produces) without being mean-like in the standard location-between-vices sense.
    • But then you might say it is a mean by analogy only.
• Could talk about how this relates to other awkward virtues – e.g., magnanimity as an adornment.
  • And the usual decency complication.
• General justice has two-place structure: it’s the whole of virtue with respect to others, whereas e.g. bravery & temperance are about the agent’s internal states.

Can justice be codified? Assess Aristotle’s answer. (2022 Q7)

• Aristotle is ambiguous / unclear about this, but overall he is sceptical of the idea that we can codify justice. He seems to think that general justice can be codified via laws, but only imperfectly, and that this leaves space for the virtue of decency (epieikeia).
• Two kinds of codifiability (after Hursthouse):
  • Strong codifiability: writing it down in terms that apply universally and can be used by an unvirtuous agent.
  • Weak codifiability: capable of being described by a set of principles, which may need some judgment in application.
• He doesn’t think justice is perfectly strongly codifiable, but DoM suggests that it is weakly codifiable.
  • Book I talks about appropriate precision for the political science; the notion that you can’t specify exactly what is right.
  • However, Aristotle does seem to be in tension in Book V talking about very mathematical ideas of arithmetic and geometric proportionality.
• The duty of the legislator is to produce laws suitable for the general population to follow, bearing in mind that many members of the populace will be unvirtuous, and brought up in bad habits such that they’re not even capable of persuasion.
  • So it is possible to codify some ideas of justice! Indeed, that is a lot of what V tries to do, with even greater structure than laws would.
    • The structure of justice: general vs specific; within specific: distributive and corrective.
• But some doubts about this: equates general justice with lawfulness, then also says there is epieikeia.
  • So, he believes it isn’t strongly codifiable, but the mechanism is unclear – is it because of phronesis, or the additional virtue of decency?
• Justice is similar to Aristotle’s other virtues in the uncodifiability, with the important difference that, unlike the other virtues, it’s really the only one which is another person’s good. This is why it is important that we do codify parts of it, within the law.

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• One way to phrase the thesis: Aristotle thinks it’s codifiable enough to be expressed in law, but not reducible to rules that can be applied without phronesis, because law is necessarily universal while situations are particular
• Remember the useful quote about the definition of the decent person – they do what the lawgiver would’ve done had he been present.
• Discussion of natural vs legal justice lets us that there’s a fact of the matter about justice, but what’s written in law only partially tracks it (since it varies between places).

‘Not everything is guided by law. For on some matters legislation is impossible, and so a decree is needed.’ (V. 10, 1137b27-9) How, if at all, does this claim fit with Aristotle’s account of justice? Is his notion of decency (epieikeia) a good way to address this issue? (2024 Q7)

• What is his distinction between legislation and a decree??
  • → Oh, the idea is that a law (nomos) is a general, standing rule that applies universally; a decree (psephisma) is a particular ad-hoc ruling for a specific case.
• His account of justice in Book V divides up justice into general justice and specific justice.
  • General justice: the whole of virtue insofar as it relates to other people. It’s identified with lawfulness.
  • Specific justice: a proper part of justice, concerned with fairness; it’s a virtue in its own right.
  • The question is what does lawfulness involve?
• The lawgiver is important to Aristotle for at least two reasons
  • He’s interested in the political science, i.e. how to organise a polis.
  • In Book X he returns to the question of moral education, and the lawgiver can provide an external standard about how to behave.
• But can the laws always be relied upon?
  • No, for two reasons. First, they might simply be mistaken; cf Irwin on legal vs lawful.
  • More fundamentally, even with wise lawgivers, it’s just not possible for the law to be perfectly applicable to every situation, because it deals with universals rather than particulars.
  • So this is why decrees are sometimes needed.
• The notion of decency: it’s better than the sort of justice where you’re just a stickler for the rules.
  • The decent person is sensitive to the morally-salient features of a situation, and responds appropriately.
  • Legislation is designed to be broadly applicable and comprehensible by ordinary citizens, so it cannot be precisely correct in every circumstance. But that means it is better to have good judgement and choose what to do.
• And this helps explain the importance of phronesis: it’s what allows individuals to on their own identify what’s right to do, because blindly mimicking external guidance won’t reliably track what’s right in every situation.

Post-Claude & examiner report notes

• Can connect to the general point about not demanding too much precision in ethics; the limits of codification.
  • And again also the Lesbian ruler in VI.10 which bends to fit around the stone.
• One puzzle: why is decency a separate quality?
  • Either general justice already incorporates phronesis and decency is superfluous, or someone can have general justice in a very rule-following way.
    • But it would be odd for there to be a stickler-like mean, and then an even better kind involving decency.
  • Resolution – the stickler for rules is demonstrating some general justice but not the full sort, which does require decency.
• Note also that the claim that legislation is sometimes impossible creates a challenge for the lawfulness characterisation of justice.
  • It means there’s a part of just action that the law simply cannot bear on.
  • And this is then a challenge for Aristotle to address, which explains why he turns to decency.